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As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton Hosted at Dinner a Ukrainian Donor to Family Foundation

Report by AP finds Democratic candidate met with many donors to organization while at State Department

Ukrainian billionaire Victor Pinchuk, shown in Davos, Switzerland, in 2014, was hosted at a dinner at Hillary Clinton’s home while she was secretary of state in 2012.
Photo:
Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg News

WASHINGTON—While she was secretary of state, Hillary Clinton hosted a dinner involving Clinton Foundation donors, including a Ukrainian businessman who had given money to the organization and who had retained a lobbyist to arrange State Department meetings.

The dinner attended by Victor Pinchuk four years ago was mentioned in a new batch of State Department emails obtained by the conservative group Citizens United through public records requests and released on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, a report Tuesday by the Associated Press based on a partial release of State Department calendars showed that at least 85 of 154 people outside government who met or spoke on the phone with Mrs. Clinton when she was secretary of state donated funds to the Clinton Foundation. The review showed the donors had collectively given up to $156 million.

A note about the dinner from a foundation official to Huma Abedin, one of Mrs. Clinton’s top deputies at the State Department, described the event as a “Clinton Foundation dinner” in June 2012 at the home of the Democratic presidential nominee and included a list of guests attending.

The dinner guest list is an elite corps of Obama administration officials, Democratic donors, political consultants and foundation donors. Mr. Pinchuk is described in a short background briefing on all the guests as a “successful businessman, whose role in civic, international affairs and charitable organizations has made him a leader in Ukraine’s growing interaction with Europe and the world.”

Republican critics say the dinner is an illustration of what they describe as the overlapping interests between Clinton Foundation donors and the Clinton-led State Department. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has called for a special prosecutor to examine dealings during Mrs. Clinton’s tenure as the nation’s top diplomat.

The Clinton campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about the Pinchuk dinner. A spokesman for the Clinton Foundation declined to comment.

People who attended the 2012 dinner at Mrs. Clinton’s home here said it was a large, buffet-style affair—not an intimate sit-down dinner—and that Mr. Pinchuk spent no more than a minute talking to Mrs. Clinton on a receiving line.

A spokesman for Mr. Pinchuk’s foundation, Thomas Weihe, said: “Victor never said something to the Clintons that would be in his own interests in terms of earning money or gaining power, to the best of my knowledge. It was really just a matter of a leading member of society of Ukraine trying to promote transformation of that country.”

Mr. Pinchuk’s Ukraine-based foundation donated at least $8.6 million to the Clinton Foundation when Mrs. Clinton was secretary of state. He is a former Ukrainian member of Parliament whose wealth comes from a pipe-making business.

During the period in which he attended the dinner, Mr. Pinchuk had retained Doug Schoen as a lobbyist to help set up meetings with State Department and White House officials in part to promote the goal of democratization in the Ukraine. Mr. Schoen is a former adviser to former President Bill Clinton.

The AP report was the result of a three-year-old request for Mrs. Clinton’s calendar and schedules and offers a partial picture of her meetings. Not included in the findings were meetings with federal employees and foreign-government representatives.

AP reviewed calendar information and detailed schedules that cover half of Mrs. Clinton’s State Department tenure. The wire service, which sued for the calendar material, expects to receive the other half prior to Election Day.

In a statement Tuesday night, Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said the AP story offered an incomplete and misleading portrait of her time at the State Department.

“This story relies on utterly flawed data,” Mr. Fallon said. “It cherry-picked a limited subset of Secretary Clinton’s schedule to give a distorted portrayal of how often she crossed paths with individuals connected to charitable donations to the Clinton Foundation.” He added, “The data does not account for more than half of her tenure as secretary.”

The campaign also took issue with the AP for excluding from its count “more than 1,700 meetings she took with world leaders, let alone countless others she took with other U.S. government officials.”